The Weeks of September 9th and 16th

It has been a busy couple of weeks. Our routines are in place and lots of learning is happening.

Literacy instruction has been focused on reading and writing narratives. We have been talking quite a bit about monitoring (watching or focusing on something) while reading. We have learned the importance of monitoring our attention to a story, the characters and their conflicts, and unfamiliar words.

Up until now, we have been writing on topics of our own choosing. We are getting much better at planning before writing and at writing fluently (not stopping often). We’ve addressed end punctuation and capitalization as well, though this will be an ongoing focus for instruction. Our learning from the social studies unit is crossing over into literacy instruction. We have been conducting research on the Chicago fire and have been reading first-hand accounts (primary sources). Now, students are writing letters and diary entries from the perspective of someone that survived the fire. We will be talking about how to craft these stories so that they are interesting to others and easy to understand.

In math, we took the Unit Two post-test, and have begun learning to add and subtract larger numbers. Additionally, we are working on applying basic algebraic concepts to balance equations.

Our science unit is beginning soon. We will be studying animal traits and classification. This is an exciting unit and I am sure we’ll learn quite a bit while having fun with the materials.